Spatial Debilities: Slow Life and Carceral Capitalism in Palestine

Lecture by Jasbir Puar (Rutgers University)

There has been much written on the forms of control enacted in the splintering occupation of Palestine, in particular regarding mobility, identity, and spatiality, yet this vast scholarship has presumed the prominence of the abled-body that is hindered through the infrastructures of occupation. In this lecture I examine the splintering occupation in relation to disability and the spatial distribution of debilitation, highlighting the logistics of border crossings and movement in the West Bank in relation to disability rights frameworks. I argue two things: one, that the creation of what Celeste Langan terms "mobility disabilities" through both corporeal assault and infrastructural and bureaucratic means are not only central to the calculus of the occupation, but importantly, linked logics of debilitation; and two, that these calibrations of various types of movement are forms of carceral containment and enclosure that render specific stretchings of space and time, what we could call slow life.  

Jasbir K. Puar is Professor and Graduate Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, where she has been a faculty member since 2000. Her most recent book is The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017) published with Duke University Press in the series ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise that she co-edits with Mel Chen.  Puar is the author of award-winning Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007), which has been translated into Spanish and French and re-issued in an expanded version for its 10^th anniversary (December 2017).

The lecture is open to the public. It is and organized by Interventions – Research Network on Humanitarian Politics and Culture